The First World War

by Hew Strachan

  These ends outstripped the means the Entente had available. The Anglo-French alliance of 1904 was predicated on an acceptance of the two powers’ respective spheres of influence in the Mediterranean and North Africa. The Dardanelles expedition threatened to undermine this delicate balance by reestablishing British predominance in the Mediterranean, especially given French long-term designs on Syria should the Ottoman Empire implode. The French navy shared the view that the scheme was impracticable, but neither the naval minister nor the French government as a whole was disposed to be left behind if the British were going ahead. The real constraint was the attitude of Joffre, who, as commander-in-chief in France itself, argued that he needed every available soldier, French or British, for the western front. Théophile Delcassé, the architect of the Entente and the French foreign minister, wanted to delay until troops were available, but Churchill would not. The upshot was that the efforts of the navy and the army were conducted in succession, not in combination.

  The Turks had plenty of warning that a naval attack up the narrows might be a possibility, and with German help had done much to improve their defences. ‘My first impression’, the American ambassador, Henry Morgenthau, recorded of a tour of the defences, ‘was that I was in Germany. The officers were practically all Germans and everywhere Germans were building buttresses with sacks of sand and in other ways strengthening the emplacements.’16 As British and French warships entered the straits, they were vulnerable to mines. Therefore the mines had to be swept first, but minesweepers had to cope with the fire from the batteries and a fast current flowing from the direction of the Black Sea into the Mediterranean. The result of these interlocking problems was that naval enthusiasm for the scheme waned, particularly that of Fisher and of the naval commander on the spot, Admiral Sackville Carden. However, Churchill remained determined and on 18 March an attempt was made to ‘rush through’ the straits using warships in daylight. Carden fell sick on the morning of the attack, and his deputy, Admiral John de Robeck, described what happened as a disaster. Three ships - two British and one French — were sunk by mines. Churchill maintained - as have others — that if the attack had been renewed on the next day it would have succeeded, because the Turks were running low on munitions. They were not. In any case, de Robeck had not abandoned the idea of a naval operation; gales prevented any action over the next five days. What de Robeck did accept was that the navy should operate in conjunction with the army - so that the batteries could be attacked from the landward side.

  The landings on the Gallipoli peninsula on 25 April 1915 were therefore not seen as the cue for the navy to hand over the attack to the army. The army relied on ship-based artillery support, but the navy confronted considerable technical difficulties in providing it. The maps it was using were inaccurate; the ground itself steep and intersected; and observation of fire inadequate. There were too few aeroplanes in the theatre, and the orders to the navy’s shore-based observers specifically instructed them to direct fire at targets a safe distance from allied soldiers. Despite all this, naval gunfire could be enormously effective. But the Turks learnt to neutralise it by attacking at night or at first light, when observation was difficult, or by keeping their trenches close in to the allied positions to maximise the risk to the British from ‘friendly fire’. On 25 May German submarines sank HMS Triumph and on 27 May HMS Majestic. All capital ships were withdrawn to port, and only destroyers with 4-inch guns remained to support land operations. The navy’s major contribution thereafter was also submarine - sinking the Turkish merchant vessels supporting the troops on the peninsula; the Turks lost half their merchant fleet in the campaign.

  Sir Ian Hamilton, the British general given charge of the British, French and imperial forces, was a sixty-two-year-old protégé of Kitchener, who had seen extensive service in colonial wars. He later attributed his failure to insufficient manpower and material. The impression was created that his small force was taking on the might of the Turkish army in its own backyard. But Hamilton did not complain about the manpower situation at the time, and he would not really have been justified if he had.

  The Dardanelles area was commanded by Liman von Sanders. He ex-pected a landing at Bulair across the neck of the peninsula. But Hamilton had rejected this option precisely because the aim was to open the passage for the ships, and Bulair was both a long way from the Dardanelles batteries and a difficult place for the navy to give fire support. He therefore chose to put his main forces ashore along the tip of Cape Helles. The French mounted a diversionary attack on Kum Kale on the Asiatic side of the straits. Further north, on the Aegean side of the peninsula, the Australian and New Zealander Army Corps went ashore behind Hamilton’s immediate target, the Kilid Bahr range. Originally slated for Europe, they had stopped in Egypt for training when the war with Turkey was declared. There they earned a reputation for mayhem and indiscipline, mingled with combativeness and high morale, which was to last throughout the war.

  A British field battery falls back from Ctesiphon to Kut, November 1915. Its 18-pounder gun, with a calibre of 83 8 mm, was much more powerful than its French or German equivalents, but in 1914 it had no high explosive shell, being supplied only with shrapnel

  Gallipoli has been defined as the moment when Australia came of age as a nation. This was largely the work of C. E. W Bean, who managed to get himself accepted as Australia’s war correspondent, rather than as the representative of an individual newspaper. Bean was born in Britain and was educated at the same English public school, Clifton, as Douglas Haig. In being a first-generation Australian he was little different from most of the Anzac soldiers on whom he reported. They fought not for Australia or New Zealand but for the ‘old country’, with which they still had strong ties of kinship and sentiment. Moreover, most of them were city-dwellers, not the bronzed ‘diggers’ from the outback of popular legend. Nor were they necessarily more natural soldiers than any other troops in this war. Morale came close to collapse on 25 April. The landings at Z beach were poorly managed, with too many troops clustering towards the north, in what became known as Anzac Cove. The result was congestion and administrative chaos. Moreover, here the Turkish reaction was vigorous and swift. Disregarding Liman von Sanders’s orders to wait until he could be sure about the direction of the main attack, Mustafa Kemal committed his whole division to holding the high ground above the beaches. ’I knew — I don’t know how, but one guessed from the way those guns were firing at all of ours, that the troops were being very severely tried‘, Bean wrote in his diary of that afternoon’s fighting. ’It was sickening to hear it.‘17 Many unwounded An zacs were making their way back to the beaches, and both the corps’ divisional commanders favoured re-embarkation. They were overruled, not least because the navy said evacuation was impossible. There were tensions, too, at lower levels of command. A New Zealand lieutenant-colonel, William Malone of the Wellington Battalion, thought that the Australian commanding officer commanding the unit alongside his should have been court-martialled and that his men were ’a source of weakness‘. When the Australians were relieved on 28 April, he wrote: ’It was an enormous relief to see the last of them. I believe they are spasmodically brave and probably the best of them had been killed or wounded. They have been, I think, badly handled and trained. Officers in most cases no good.‘18

  The problems at Anzac Cove were not reproduced at most of the main beaches at Helles. Against their expectations, the British got ashore with comparative ease, except at V beach. The Turks were in disarray, held back by Liman von Sanders’s orders. But the failure to exploit the opportunity with a rapid follow-up to the landings condemned the allied advance to a stalemate comparable with that which had now established itself on the western front. Successive attacks on Krithia, a village on the forward slopes of the high ground of Achi Baba which dominated the peninsula, failed. As the Turks built up their defences, so trench warfare asserted itself. The differences from the western front were the products of the terrain and the climate. The na
rrow and steep foothold on the shore meant that the positions had little depth, and that the only relief was to go for a swim in the sea. But the heat that made that an attractive option also brought flies and then disease, particularly dysentery; water supplies were a constant headache. Only 30 per cent of British casualties in the campaign were sustained in battle.

  The allies’ forward bases were on the islands of Imbros and Lemnos, and those further back in Egypt and Malta. On the hospital ships the nurses were women. One, a New Zealander called Lottie LeGallais, wrote in September, ‘it was dreadful, and what with fleas and crawlers my skin at present is nearly raw, but we all scratch - scratch — except the men patients poor devils, they are used to them’. In November a transport was torpedoed, and LeGallais reported on the fate of the nurses. ‘Fox they say her back was broken, another nurse both legs; Rattray had two nurses keeping her up for hours, they were holding on to spars & with hands crossed these girls kept Rattray up until she became mental & died of exhaustion.’19

  The respect that built up between the allies and the Turks should not be exaggerated. There were armistices to collect the dead. But snipers when captured were regularly shot out of hand, as were other prisoners. One French officer, Jean Giraudoux, wrote on 13 June 1915, ‘The Australians massacre all the Turks: the Australian’s national enemy, one of them said to me, is the Turk’.20 Nor could British prisoners necessarily expect any better treatment. Some Ottoman soldiers, uprooted from inner Anatolia, thought they were off to fight Greece, a traditional enemy, but others were like Hasan Ethem, who wrote to tell his mother that he had prayed: ‘My God, all that heroic soldiers want is to introduce thy name to the French and English. Please accept this honourable desire of ours and make our bayonets sharper so that we may destroy our enemy! ... You have already destroyed a great number of them so destroy some more.’21

  On 6 August Hamilton tried to relaunch the campaign with a thrust from the Anzac positions designed to secure the high ground of the Sari Bair ridge. Only Chunuk Bair was captured, by Malone’s Wellington Battalion, but it could not hold the forward slope and Malone himself was killed by friendly naval fire. Simultaneously a landing to the north at Suvla Bay was designed to support the attack on Sari Bair by capturing the high ground adjacent to it, and by establishing a new port for the navy to use. When the Anzac attacks miscarried, Hamilton presented the Suvla thrust as the principal one and found a scapegoat for his setback in its dilatory corps commander, Sir Frederick Stopford.

  The idea of evacuation had been bruited before the Suvla landings; after their failure it grew in force. ‘Raining tonight’, Bean wrote in his journal on 26 August. ‘I think our hardships will really begin with the winter - though I must say that, by the way in which the Tommies, who come here from elsewhere compare their lot as enviable, I am not sure that we haven’t been greater heroes than we were inclined to think of ourselves.’22 The story of the evacuation at the end of 1915 is traditionally told as one of excellent staff work and successful deception, an effort to salvage some relic of self-respect from defeat. But, for all the difficulties of disengaging from an enemy in the field, the key point remains that it was hardly in the Turks’ interests to prolong the allies’ departure or to incur further losses needlessly. The Turks had 86,692 dead; the French suffered 10,000 more than the Australians, whose deaths totalled 8,709, a low number by the horrific standards of this war; the French dead were less than half those of the British. New Zealand’s losses were smaller still, 2,721.

  It was not only Australian and New Zealand national identity that was forged at Gallipoli, it was also Turkey’s. This was a major victory, less for the Ottoman Empire than for the ethnically and geographically more defined state that emerged from the First World War. Moreover, although many of the architects of the defensive battle were German, it produced a Turkish hero who became the founder of that state, Mustafa Kemal. It was he who was accorded the credit for rallying the Turks at Anzac on 25 April, and it was he whose men had checked Malone’s New Zealanders at Chunuk Bair on 8 August.

  MESOPOTAMIA

  In Entente counsels what militated against evacuation from Gallipoli was not the effects within Turkey but the wider political ramifications within the Muslim world. In Mesopotamia, too, the British forces had overreached themselves. Easy victories at the outset had spurred on the ambitions of Sir John Nixon, the commander on the spot. Grandiose notions of a converging movement linking with the Russians coming down through Persia and Azerbaijan did not help. But the real difficulty was that Nixon was not subject to firm direction. In London, the general staff at the War Office was cautious, anxious not to overcommit itself so far from the main theatre of operations in Europe. But the campaign was less the responsibility of the War Office and more that of the Government of India: it provided the bulk of the troops. Indian official opinion was divided. On the one hand, it was attracted to control of Mesopotamia in order to secure India. Moreover, a major victory against the Turks would settle Muslim sentiment in the subcontinent, an argument which grew in force as the setbacks on the Gallipoli peninsula mounted. On the other, this argument cut two ways: another setback in the war against the Turks would be disastrous for British prestige in the Islamic world.

  Ambition overrode caution. The British general staff estimates of 60,000 troops being sent to reinforce the Ottoman 6th Army were grossly exaggerated, even after the Turks had cleared the threat to the Dardanelles. The Turks had about 17,000 men in Mesopotamia at the outset of the war. By the winter of 1915 — 16, the 6th Army mustered 25,000 men. It had no heavy artillery and it was four to six weeks’ march from Constantinople. In March 1915 Nixon enjoyed at least a two-to-one superiority, and he was authorised to occupy the whole province of Basra up as far as Kut al-Amara, a town on a bend of the Tigris, and at its confluence with the Shatt al-Hai. With Kut secured by the end of September, Nixon now pressed for an advance on Baghdad itself. His forward divisional commander, Sir Charles Townshend, had become a national hero in 1895, when he was besieged in Chitral on the North-West Frontier of India. Townshend was reluctant to go on. He had reached the limit of his logistical capabilities. His medical arrangements were inadequate and the navigation of the Tigris down to Basra was impeded by low water. But most important of all he was doubtful of the quality of his Indian troops.

  In July 1914 the government of India said it could provide two divisions and one cavalry brigade for use outside India. In the event Nixon’s command was one of four expeditionary forces it sent overseas. India enlisted over a million men during the course of the war, but in so extending itself it strained both its infrastructure and its recruiting base. When Townshend reached Ctesiphon (or Selman Pak) on 22 November 1915 his units were one-third below their establishment. The Turks fought a successful defensive action. However, Townshend’s decision to fall back on Kut was a reflection of his waning confidence rather than of any Turkish superiority. At Ctesiphon almost half his British officers were sick or wounded, and the lack of officers had two direct consequences for his force, as well as for its relief when it found itself besieged in Kut. First, staff work collapsed. Townshend himself failed to form a proper estimate of his food position or of how long he could hold out. Back at Basra, a divisional staff could not be formed for the three brigades that arrived in January 1916. Second, junior leadership declined and morale with it. Townshend was reluctant to breach religious scruples regarding diet for fear of worsening the spirit of his troops, but he could not prevent 147 of them deserting during the course of the siege. Rather than fight his way out, he waited for relief which did not arrive. The winter rains now raised the water level of the Tigris, so aiding navigation but rendering operations along its banks extraordinarily difficult: ‘the entire surface of the land’, Abdul Rauf Khan, serving with an Indian field ambulance, wrote, ‘becomes a quagmire in which the slush is knee deep’.23 The relieving force could not envelop the Turks in its path: it was tied on one flank to the river that provided its transport, and it la
cked the manpower to stretch out into the slush to get round the other. Four attempts resulted in 23,000 casualties, almost twice the strength of the Kut garrison.

  For Nixon the siege of Kut was a means to other ends: the British forward base for its advance into Mesopotamia and the pivot of a massive allied envelopment involving the Russians swinging through Persia. It similarly acquired a dual significance for the Turks and Germans. In October 1915 the septuage narian German general Colmar von der Goltz was given the command of the 6th Army. His mission, Enver told him, was ‘to prepare an independent war against India’.24 Von der Goltz’s primary objective was not to re-establish Ottoman control of lower Mesopotamia but to keep the route open through Persia and Afghanistan. He was to carry the holy war to the heart of the British Empire. It was a task which revealed the dependence of the Turkish — German alliance on achieving pragmatic congruities despite divergent aims. Berlin promoted Persia’s independence; Constantinople sought its subjugation. The capture of Kut provided a short-term priority which glossed over the differences in long-term strategy.